Of Margins and Mayhem

In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz explores questions of agency and ownership, using a Foucauldian approach toward the dynamics of power he observes in the production and reception of black spiritual music in the United States and how this evolved across 19th and 20th century political and social contexts.  I find this approach useful as I struggle to interpret the complex power dynamics in the six-decade career of Lydia Mendoza.  Mendoza began her recording career on the "race record" collections by Okeh records in the 1920s, and by the 1970s and '80s had become a symbol of Mexican-American and feminist Chicana pride, eventually earning the National Medal of Art by President Clinton in 1999.  Throughout her career, she increased the awareness of the Mexican American minority in the U.S. by expressing the ranchera genre to the non-Mexican cultural majority.  Yet in the complicated turbulence of blazing a global career as a U.S. ethnic minority, her performances also helped reinforce stereotypes of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for her Anglo crowd.

Observe, for example, the image below, complete with southwest styling, deep colors dominated by red and green (colors of the Mexican flag, which are a near constant in Mendoza's wardrobe) and the broad sombrero in the background.  Intentional or not, the sombrero droops downward over a striped poncho. You can almost see the iconic image of the napping Mexican figure underneath. (If you need assistance conjuring that image, you can go here.)

The challenge for both Mendoza herself and the scholar who explores her career is to carefully walk the fine line between where she pushes social boundaries and barriers and where she reaffirms them. 

What does one do, for example, with this video: 

Here, we see Lydia Mendoza and two prominent scholars of folklore and Mexican American music, Gene Bluestein and Manuel Peña.  The purpose of this video is to venerate Lydia Mendoza and her long career.  They both admire and respect her and her music, and Peña reflects on her as a pioneer for the Mexican American community.  Yet Mendoza herself is silent while they narrate her story -- she listens, adjusts the microphone on her guitar, looks off into the distance (albeit probably listening) and they control the narrative.  She speaks only in Spanish, although she reacts to what they say and responds directly to their English-language comments, indicating she understands at least some, if not all, of what they are saying.  She then introduces the song itself in Spanish, and begins to sing with the powerful guitar and voice that made her an icon of feminist/chicana strength. The song she sings here is "Mal Hombre," which has been interpreted by scholars as a sign of her feminism, but which she simply says she plays whenever it is requested -- and it is requested a lot.  So here we come to Cruz's crucial question of musical production and the ownership of that production or the message behind the production.  Is she a feminist because she sings powerfully a song about a powerful woman, or do we attribute the mentality to the audiences who repeatedly request the song?   How does one reconcile the image of her as a feminist icon when her narrative here is controlled her by two male scholars?  Or that, despite Mal Hombre's fame, the majority of the ranchera and corrido lyrics she sang were anything but feminist in nature? 

Ultimately, Lydia Mendoza was an internationally successful, minority woman singer whose professional activities made her the sole wage earner for her, her husband, and their daughters.  This in itself can be seen as a feminist stance, particularly given the early 20th-century timeline for this.  My work is cut out for me in pulling apart these power dynamics and incorporating them in a meaningful way into my research.  I am grateful to Jon Cruz for providing a theoretical framework to help me with this task.

Kelley Merriam Castro